essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
Gravity balances on my shoulders,
tosses back the balls while I wait
for their sandy pop in my palms.
I get lighter by the day.
the sound of sliced cabbages
shadows painted on the floor
brick façades & blunt gables
a swarm of rats follow a lone woman
wherever she sleepwalks
all bedsheet ladders lead to you
You reached for the branch
without looking at me as I
signalled you to back away,
to veer away from the tree,
where a snake in full makeup
had hit its mark, awaiting a cue.
Last night, I dreamt about them again. All moon-faced and lovely and it stirred that familiar ache.
Introduction February 2014. Just as Russia was invading and annexing Crimea, the world was watching another case of Putin showing off, also in the Black Sea region: the Winter Olympics in Sochi. So far the most expensive Games on the record, they were meant to demonstrate Russia’s opulence and grandeur, and, of course, to highlight…
The first potatoes I loved were the dehydrated shreds sold in cereal box-style cartons at Key Foods. My mother gave them some delicacy, stirring in milk, butter, salt. On holidays her mashed potatoes were perfect, and doted on accordingly. They were adjusted hourly for flavour and texture, refrigerated overnight, and reheated slowly on the day….
We’re hit with a waft of espresso. The thunder of grinding coffee beans. The high-pitched hiss of steamed milk. Our wish is granted.
There is something in her hands. Something in a large Pyrex dish. It is hot, very hot. She nearly drops it on the floor but instead the kitchen work top catches it. The dish itself doesn’t smash. It isn’t a big enough drop for that. She looks down at it, trying to work out what it is.
A Chisinau bus will teach you the city. The Moldovan capital’s network of these vehicles, and its trolleybuses and marshrutkas – the decrepit minivans, unchanged since Soviet days – could take you anywhere, for nearly nothing. Mostly you paid in physical stress. Riders crammed into spaces meant for people half their size; young mothers loaded…
My mother loved her garden: the Lily of the Nile, the roses, the lemon tree, the hydrangea at her bedroom window. Hydrangeas flower blue or pink depending on your soil – hers were always blue. The weeds, however, she did not love. “A weed is just a flower growing in the wrong place,” she would…
We pass plates of kawage, kibbeh, moutabal
between us around the semi-circle of table.
A True Crime Story Which Never Happened I [hereafter known as The Author] have been considering truth and fact. Truth, as something malleable. Fact, as something that influences the changing of truths.[1] The Author has considered this in particular detail in relation to True Crime and the ways in which truth is manipulated here (no,…
Limonero Moon I had a sour thought, as if I bitinto a lemon, and the bitter mistsettled on my naked eye like dewor vinaigrette: the red eye weptand suppurated, pitying itself.I was a thought ungrateful, a thought sharpand zestless, pithy: what had given methe pip? The cloudy juice ran down my cheek. As in your…
Peregrine has put them up;
one, against one thousand. They
need eyes in the back of their head.
His eyes, forwards only, burning
on the brown-gold and white
pulsating flock.
And here I am, unsure of my value
Crushing myself through the doors
Ice and dirt crumbling from me
Leaving meltwater on the mat
like you are the aurora borealis, a thirsty balloon,
wanting and worthy of more air, ready to gorge
on forest fruits, and salt and garlic, and cinnamon,
like you are every season and its harvest
Our joke ran
that I would hand him the ladybird kite,
him in his little black windbreaker,
and I’d plead with him to hold on,
and he’d smile like all the world wasn’t enough,
My weight is
three black labradors lazing
a mummy moon bear
or a black and white ostrich
In the courtyard, at the entrance to the bookshop, an egg smashed on the cobbled ground – albumen, yolk and the bald outline and bulging eye of an almost-bird.
stick your worm-like head
to the surface of muddy waters
will yourself into existence
I grab the deck rail,
expecting a disturbance
—a pitching and yawing—
but the ferry glides smoothly
over the sea’s fleecy crimp,
like a brush through kid fibre.
They don’t make
houses pink and white
like coconut ice-cream.
They’re always plain, dull colors.
It’s all so easy
when it should be exhilarating.
The body wants to do the dropout boogie,
a way to just slowly spiral out
of reality and not include my self with its accessories
I see the cat before the cat sees me.
White with black splotches, a longhair.
Leaving the law behind it,
stealing easily as light fails
Everybody called her ‘a character’,
a regular in the library
in her shabby Barbour jacket
and crumpled hat perched
on hair dishevelled as a bird’s nest.
When I bent down to give her a kiss,
she quacked
Then exploded with loud report
into hundreds of pieces.
There is an unspoken rule in a therapy group that you are not going to go out for a beer afterwards. It’s the same way that no-one actually tells you that you shouldn’t have sex with someone you just met on the third day of a meditation retreat, but you still know it isn’t a very good idea.
Discover the books that the Porridge team enjoyed reading this year.
In boxes of old photographs, you sometimes come across nightclub pictures from the 1950s and 1960s. These images sit at the boundary between the public and private, the posed portrait and the casual snapshot. They were taken by ‘snappers’ who worked in the nightclubs, taking pictures of couples and groups of adults enjoying themselves which…
They do not know that the sun terrifies me.
At time of writing, the infamous bird app, Twitter, is going through a rough patch. For those of you who are enviably unaware, the platform recently gained a new owner, whose grand designs for his acquisition are still being revealed to everyone, apparently even to the man himself. The site currently has an ‘end of…
The pro- and anti-Brutalist building camps can be defined in two words apiece. There are those who believe such buildings are ‘concrete poetry’, and there are those who believe that each one is a ‘concrete monstrosity’. Like the battlefields of WW1, there is nothing living in between. Brutalism’s tenure at the forefront of architecture was…
Thinking about this, they grow wide-eyed and speak so fast that the windows become flecked with child spittle. How can they have made themselves so ridiculous by dreaming?
come inside! we’ve got so much to show you! over there you’ll find a mosaic-laden platter of figs, dates, & grapes, little green & purple appetizers like bougainvillea petals against a vine-entangled fence.
The horoscope said: You are a fish. You will come to understand this. She found this funny because it seemed like something more suitable for a fortune cookie, and because she had once had a boyfriend who, during arguments, told her that she kissed like a koi carp.
I can still see her today. Tall, blond, and statuesque, a platinum-haired goddess with perfect teeth and a year-round tan. She was standing in the middle of the dance floor at my parents’ annual Christmas party – except it wasn’t really a dance floor. It was the dining room of our house, but with all…
Hooves leave a hard imprint, a dark wet mark.
Hoof-clop like the noise your tongue makes
When it leaves the roof of your mouth.
Its big head, glassy stare
and halting hobble
from random ewe to ewe
made me think of you –
they sit on the bridge. they cluster
as close as the round bulbs
of road-swollen blackberries,
dusty with travel.
Cutting my hair with the meat scissors,
being told off for not using a hairdresser,
explaining that if I don’t change something
often I will do something worse
‘Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.’ (84) In definition of genre, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) has a wingspan that ranges fiction, nonfiction, and the ambiguous nonfiction novel. In definition of content, it is both a book with ‘dramatic power’ that warrants ‘honorary…
we revered those rake-limbed lads
on the slot machines
as though they were gods,
not fishermen’s lads.
Underscoring the onset of nausea on the pier, feelings of self-loathing
also bubble up to the surface. “I get seasick in the bathtub, man,”
declares a ponytailed dude in Plymouth pink.
Henri is at least good for catching the scent of socio-political turmoil in the air.
Porridge 